“Take Away the Thing About Market Timing Not Always Being Required for Every Investor, and I’m a Buy-and-Holder. All the Rest Checks Out. But That Thing About Market Timing Not Being Required Is the Worst Mistake Ever Made in the History of Personal Finance.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“ I think it is an issue of people seeing how many lives the relentless promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy can ruin in the next price crash”

Yet that is what you are pushing. You expecting a $500 million windfall, similar to playing the lottery. Buy and Hold is the opposite. It is methodically putting away a percentage of money over a lifetime of work, consistently, month after month, year after year, without risky timing schemes

Buy-and-Holders disdain market timing. So they have no means of exercising price discipline when they buy stocks. That’s like driving a car without brakes, Sooner or later prices get so high that the market collapses. The price collapse causes people to lose so much money that consumer spending contracts, bringing down the entire economic system. In one case, we even saw a Great Depression. Not this boy, you know?

Take away the thing about market timing not always being required for every investor, and I’m a Buy-and-Holder, just like you, Anonymous. All the rest checks out. But that thing about market timing not being required is the worst mistake ever made in the history of personal finance. It causes an ocean of human misery every time it catches on. We all need to pull together as a nation and insist that honest posting be permitted at every internet site so that we can warn people about how dangerous it is to have a stock market in which most investors are failing to exercise price discipline when buying stocks.

My sincere take.

Rob